CAP 6610, Machine Learning, Fall 2019

Place:CSE Building; E222
Time:MWF 4 (10:40-11:30 a.m.)

Instructor:
Arunava Banerjee
Office: CSE E336.
E-mail: arunava@ufl.edu.
Phone: 294-6641.
Office hours: Tuesday 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m.

TA:
Johnathan Smith
Office: CSE E555.
E-mail: emallson@ufl.edu.
Office hours: Wednesday 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m.(at CSE E309)

Pre-requisites:

Textbook (recommended): Machine Learning: A Probabilistic Perspective, Murphy, ISBN-10: 0262018020.

Reference: Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, Bishop, ISBN 0-38-731073-8.

Reference: Pattern Classification, 2nd Edition, Duda, Hart and Stork, John Wiley, ISBN 0-471-05669-3.

Tentative list of Topics to be covered

The above list is tentative at this juncture and the set of topics we end up covering might change due to class interest and/or time constraints.

Please return to this page at least once a week to check updates in the table below

Evaluation:

The final grade will be on the curve.

Course Policies:

Academic Dishonesty: See http://www.dso.ufl.edu/judicial/honestybrochure.htm for Academic Honesty Guidelines. All academic dishonesty cases will be handled through the University of Florida Honor Court procedures as documented by the office of Student Services, P202 Peabody Hall. You may contact them at 392-1261 for a "Student Judicial Process: Guide for Students" pamphlet.

Students with Disabilities: Students requesting classroom accommodation must first register with the Dean of Students Office. The Dean of Students Office will provide documentation to the student who must then provide this documentation to the Instructor when requesting accommodation.

Announcements

Please return to this page at least once a week. All announcements will be posted on this page.

The three midterms will take place on: Sept 23rd, Oct 28th, and Dec 4th. Midterms are NOT cumulative.

HomeWorks

HomeWork Due Date Solutions

List of Topics covered

Week Topic Additional Reading
Aug 18 - Aug 24
  • Introduction
  • Examples of ML applications and what they do
  • Spam fliter, Ad-sense, Face detection/recognition, Hurricane path prediction, Stock prediction, web search, Recommendation system
Aug 25 - Aug 31
  • Putative framework:
  • Supervised, Unsupervised Learning. Reinforcement Learning
  • Labeled/unlabeled datasets, training/testing.
  • Over-fitting to training data
  • Hypothesis space/ Concept class
  • Multi-variate regression and normal equation; Ordinary least squares
Sep 01 - Sep 07
  • Labor day and Hurricane Dorian
  • Ridge regression/Tikhonov regularization/weight decay
  • Lasso(least absolute shrinkage and selection operator)
Sep 08 - Sep 14
  • The "Risk functional" approach Loss function, Hypothesis space/Concept class
  • Application to the classification problem, and the 0/1 loss function
  • Decision theory
Sep 15 - Sep 21
  • The "Risk functional" approach continued
  • Application to regression and density estimation
  • Empirical Risk and the Empirical risk minimization principle
  • Jensen's inequality
  • Brief review of Mathematical Probability Theory;
  • Sample space, outcome
  • Measurable space, sigma algebra
  • Random Variables; Distribution function
  • Expected Value
Sep 22 - Sep 28
  • MIDTERM I
  • Probability bounds: Markov and Chebyshev inequalities
  • Weak law of large numbers
  • Hoeffding's inequality
Here Proof of the VC theorem
Sep 29 - Oct 05
  • Hoeffding's inequality continued
  • Vapnik Chervonenkis theorem for generalization error
  • VC dimension
  • Shatter coefficient (sometimes called growth function)
Oct 06 - Oct 12
  • Artificial sigmoidal neuron and gradient descent on error
  • Multi-layer perceptrons and Error back propagation
  • Neural nets as universal approximators
  • The vanishing and exploding gradient problem
  • Loss functions; Activation Functions
  • Book On Deep Learning by Goodfellow, Bengio, Courville
  • GAN by Goodfellow et al.
  • VAE by Kingma and Welling.
Oct 13 - Oct 19
  • Recap of Error backpropagation. On-line learning, epoch, over-fitting, convolutional neural net. Transpose convolutional net.
  • Autoencoders
  • Brief review of GAN (Generative Adversarial network) and VAE (Variational Auto encoder) objectives
  • Convex functions, Thm: local minima = global minima
  • Convex sets.
Oct 20 - Oct 26
  • The Lagrange Multiplier technique; Equality and Inequality constrints
  • Convex optimization: Inequality and Equality constraints
  • Primal form of maximal margin classifier (aka SVM)
  • With and Without slack formulation
Oct 27 - Nov 02
  • MIDTERM II
  • Duality; the Lagrange Dual problem.
  • Dual formulation of maximal margin classifier (aka SVM)
  • Linear, Polynomial, Gaussian Kernel
Nov 03 - Nov 09
  • Strong duality
  • Slater's condition
  • Intuitive explanation of dual formulation
  • Decision Trees; Gini Impurity, Information theoretic Entropy
  • Prunning, cross validation, minimum description length
Nov 10 - Nov 16
  • Mutual Information
  • Kullback-Liebler Divergence
  • Unsupervised Learning
  • Frequentist (Maximum Likelihood)
  • Bayesian (Prior and Posterior distribution; maximum a posteriori)
  • Notion of Posterior consistency
Nov 17 - Nov 23
  • Maximum likelihood (ML) and Bayesian parameter estimation (maximum a posteriori, i.e., MAP)
  • Conjugate priors, Binomial and it conjugate (Beta)
  • Multinomial and Dirichlet
  • Multivariate Gaussian
  • Started Mixture of Gaussian and Expectation Maximization
Nov 24 - Nov 30
  • Mixture of Gaussians and Expectation Maximization.
  • Thanksgiving break
  • Wiki on K-Means clustering.
  • Here are D'Souza's notes.
Dec 01 - Dec 07
  • Finished Mixture of Gaussians and Expectation Maximization.
  • K-Means clustering
  • MIDTERM III